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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27887 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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In his latest link roundup, Scott links to (a pre-print?) of a paper claiming to show that "Black families who were enslaved until the Civil War continue to have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than Black families who were free before the Civil War".

Here is Scott's commentary:

New study finds that black people whose ancestors were enslaved on the eve of the Civil War, compared to black people whose ancestors were free at the time, continue to have lower education/wealth/income even today. If true, this provides strong supports the ”cycle of poverty” story of racial inequality, and boosts the argument for reparations. But I’ve also seen studies say the opposite of this. I would be much more willing to accept the new study as an improvement on the old one if not for, well, things like the link above [1] - I have no evidence that anything like that was involved, but at this point it’s hard not to be paranoid. Does anyone know a good third-party commentary on this analysis?

[1] Here Scott talks about "the trend to bar scientists from accessing government datasets if their studies might get politically incorrect conclusions"

I'd be very interested in learning what you make of the study and how you think it links to Scott's conclusions. What evidence would it take to convince you that the "cycle of poverty" hypothesis is true / explains a large portion of the black/everyone else disparity across a number of different life outcomes?

It's always a fantastic gut check to ask, "What would it take to convince me otherwise?" And this mental habit is one reason why I think this group has remained so high quality for so long.

Ideally, we would have IQ scores for every slave/free black in America since before abolition, along with all family trees, so we can observe the prevalence of success markers between the two groups controlled for IQ. My guess is that some blacks who were free before emancipation were free for a reason, and this reason is why the descendants of free blacks are more successful today than their enslaved counterparts. But, if I'm wrong, we would see otherwise identical individuals differ markedly in outcomes solely because of the difference between their ancestors date of emancipation.

I guess this theory really relies on the idea that free people accumulate wealth no matter what, which seems really stupid to be honest. And that wealth is primarily responsible for success because your able to afford better education, nutrition, healthcare, etc. — this doesn't jive with me. Go back far enough, you have to find someone who started with nothing but his body and mind and made something of himself because of who he was. And this is the thing that those advocates of this cycle of poverty idea can't let themselves entertain.

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